How Trusting Communities Shaped Aberdeen's Jazz Festival

When we were offered the chance to sit down with Simon Gall, Development Director at Aberdeen Jazz Festival, we couldn’t pass it up. Simon’s thoughtful approach to blending community collaboration with creative freedom has shaped one of the most intriguing arts festivals in the city. We were eager to hear more about how putting trust in communities and local artists can create powerful cultural experiences.

Aberdeen Jazz Festival opened yesterday (13 March) for its 22nd year, showcasing world-class talent, innovative performances, and community-led events across the city. Spanning 11 days, with over 30 shows at nine diverse venues, highlights include Jazz FM’s ‘UK Jazz Act of the Year’ Georgia Cécile performing from her new EP, City Girl, and the eagerly awaited return of Neil Cowley Trio after a seven-year break.

In this conversation, Simon shares fascinating insights into his journey from touring musician to influential community arts leader. He also reveals the behind-the-scenes dynamics of the festival, highlighting memorable moments where community-driven projects led to surprising and rewarding outcomes. Get ready to explore how jazz—and music more broadly—is evolving in Aberdeen, and why sharing creative control can transform festivals and the communities they serve.

Could you tell us about yourself and how your journey led you to become Development Director at Aberdeen Jazz Festival?

I’m also a musician and an Ethnologist, so I have a few hats that I wear. I studied music and played it professionally, touring and recording with various bands for years and years, and eventually just settled into roles around the development of organisations - so strategy, funding, monitoring, evaluation, and so on - I still play, but the main bulk of my work now is in development within cultural organisations, and in this case, obviously Jazz Scotland.

Jazz means different things to different people—what was your entry point into jazz, and how has that influenced your approach to engaging with Aberdeen’s communities?

My entry point was actually as a player, so I had studied music after I left school and had played different styles of music but eventually settled on jazz, and tried to do that quite seriously for a number of years moving first to Vienna then to Barcelona to play with bands and tour there.

I eventually ended up playing and touring with Salsa Celtica, so there was the jazz background that became mixed first in Barcelona with Salsa and Latin American styles and then with Salsa Celtica in Scotland and other Salsa bands. That was my entry point really…I had studied and played jazz then I had moved into other other styles bringing with me the jazz knowledge and skills and that was how I got into it.

Your Vision & Community Focus

Was there a particular moment or collaboration that sparked your passion for community-driven cultural programming?

My commitment to community work comes from a different place - soon after I finished studying music I began to work in what you could probably call community music or community development with arts and music, you know, working in various community centres delivering projects with groups of young people, and so on.

I came to work in about 2013 for SHMU in Aberdeen – Station House Media Unit – as the Music Development Worker there and that tended to involve devising projects with local young people, finding funding to make those projects happen, and delivering those projects.

From there it just continued to grow and expand. That was pretty formative in my approach to working with communities, but what really deepened my approach was when I did my Master’s in Ethnology and Folklore and became interested in this area of work called Public Folklore or Public Ethnology, and ideas around cultural democracy and co-production.

This training encouraged me to start thinking about how we were even defining key terms such as culture and art. I came to stop thinking about the term culture as only professional performing arts or only visual arts, and came to prefer to think about it as broadly a way of life, but more specifically the expressive behaviour, the aesthetic behaviour, the artistic in the everyday basically has become a key interest of mine.

I think what’s also key is the willingness and the drive to share, I suppose you could say, curatorial authority with different cultural communities - so ethnic minority groups or musicians working within very different scenes. That drive to share the authority and resources with them and that co-programming drive really ultimately comes from the understanding that we don’t know everything. I think it can be pretty dangerous when one person, a single curator or programmer, thinks that they do and the program only reflects what they know.

Actually, a step before that is understanding that music that is related to jazz is being played in Aberdeen, but it’s often been played by people in spaces in which the majority of, what you could call, mainstream organisations or artists would just simply…they just wouldn’t simply encounter them.

So, for example, Aberdeen has possibly the largest Nigerian community, perhaps African community in Scotland and through working with Raven Afrikulture, for example, we came to see just how many great musicians there are within those communities and what they’re playing and where they’re playing – it was generally not in the traditional arts spaces, but at churches, or at social gatherings, or in clubs, newer clubs that maybe, maybe the more mainstream arts world than Aberdeen didn’t know about.

Similarly, in order to have become aware for a a band like Abergaitas, you have to be aware that there is a Venezuelan community, you have to somehow slowly become connected with that community, you have to recognise that that band met at the Catholic church, particularly around the Spanish language Mass, and originally started to play that music in church contexts, and social gatherings, and private Venezuelan parties.

But as soon as you realise that the musicians are there, and that they’re trying to make things work, it’s at that point you can help. You can use the festival as a platform to help open doors and allow these musicians to speak for themselves on more mainstream platforms like the jazz festival.

Reflecting on your experiences at the festival, what’s been your proudest moment when you’ve seen your vision for community collaboration come to life?

I think it would be probably handing over some of the curatorial control as I’ve said. HOURS, for example, who are a local promoter of rap and hip-hop are very connected to the local hip-hop scene and are at the helm there. We have some nice partnerships as well with the Middlefield Community Hub, a community project. Again, we had been invited in by the leaders of that project to help them put together a regular monthly jazz concert, and we were able to help support them to write a funding application and to secure funds, and then we’ve been able to give some time to some of our freelancers to help program and support the delivery of that.

Creative Autonomy & Empowerment

Could you share a memorable experience when handing creative control to communities that led to something innovative or genuinely surprising?

Yes, for a number of years, probably three years now I think, we have handed over an evening and a budget, of course, to HOURS, and what’s been surprising about it is not the level of talent, I was very aware of the level of talent in Aberdeen amongst the rappers, but has been how well received those nights have been by a jazz audience. So, they have their own audiences, hip-hop fans who come along, but the festival also acts as a magnet and draws in people who are just interested in all sorts of improvised grooves, jazz and jazz-adjacent music, and it’s always been surprising how well attended those nights have been. You see people in the crowd that you would not expect to see necessarily at a hip-hop event, so that’s been one of the surprises so far.

How do you approach community collaborations so everyone involved feels genuinely heard, respected, and creatively fulfilled?

We approach community collaborations in different ways. There isn’t really a one-size-fits-all approach. In some cases, we can make suggestions, you know, ‘would you like to be part of our festival?’ So, for the last two or three years, we’ve had an act go into a care home, for example, in Sheddocksley. The way I tend to frame this approach is the ‘festival in the community’. So that’s when the festival says ‘would anybody out-with the mainstream spaces in the city centre like live music?’ And so we’ve had uptake from local dance classes that support people with Parkinson’s, sheltered housing complexes, community centres, and so on. As I say, they would invite acts in and we’d be able to pay from our community budget for them to have some live music.

Using this ‘democratisation of culture’ approach, we’re cast as the centre in that we’re enabling people to access what we do, but we’re also expanding towards that ‘cultural democracy’ approach where we’re saying ‘we don’t know everything, and we have a platform, we have some skills and we have some resources’, and we want to hand that over so that other people can achieve their cultural, or musical, goals.

Inclusion & Cultural Representation

Aberdeen is becoming increasingly culturally diverse. How do you make sure that the festival genuinely captures and reflects our evolving identity?

We need to be able to see the diversity. We need to be able to understand what cultural or in this case musical expressions, musical styles, musical activities are happening within all of the different diverse communities in Aberdeen, So, I think the first step is making sure that we can see the diversity, then we need to put aside some of our ideas, I think, about what musical presentation should be. So, the jazz festival has traditionally been about putting high-quality artists on stage in front of an audience, there’s very much an audience artist/audience binary for the vast majority of what we do, but we need to recognise that that is not necessarily the way that other communities consume, engage or interact with music. In some cases, it could be part of a religious ceremony, or maybe it could be part of celebrations such as weddings, gatherings, funerals, calendar custom celebrations and so on.

It may also be that not every community sees arts as a separate area of life or even as a profession. They may not see music as something to be consumed and paid for in this way. So we need to be aware not only of the diversity of Aberdeen and who is here and what they’re doing, but also how music works in their lives and be open to the fact that it’s not the way that it has traditionally worked necessarily.

And once you’ve understood who’s here, what music is happening within different spaces and different communities, and you’ve considered that music can be engaged in different ways and can be present in different people’s lives in different ways, then you can start to take some action and hand over some control of the program and resources through the festival.

That’s what we have within our power to do. And so that’s, I think, what we’re trying to do.

Could you tell us about a particular festival event or partnership that reinforced your belief in community-focused programming and its wider cultural significance?

We’re starting to think about work year round and also work that is not necessarily ‘put-on-stageable’ or presentable to an audience. So, that could be quiet artist development work in the background. That could be education programs that run in the evening. It could be programs around health and wellbeing that don’t necessarily have an output of any sort or at least a public-facing output.

Influence & Ambitions

Your community-led approach at Aberdeen Jazz Festival feels quite pioneering. Have you noticed other festivals or cultural organisations in Scotland starting to take inspiration from your work?

The short answer is no, I haven’t noticed it. I haven’t really been out looking too hard at the other festivals in Scotland to see if they’re copying us, but at the same time, we also haven’t shouted very loudly about this approach.

We haven’t really published anything necessarily except in funding applications which are only really seen by funders, but we haven’t published anything public-facing. Maybe this piece in fact would be the first.

As you start bringing this community-centred model to Dundee and beyond, what’s exciting you most about the potential to influence Scotland’s wider cultural landscape?

I think the potential, for me the most interesting thing is that I feel like we’re following the music. I feel like the music itself, the music that people are making…because the country is becoming more and more diverse and its tastes have changed and its interests have changed and its politics have changed considerably in the last, let’s say 20 odd years since the jazz festival began.

It is very different. Artists are mixing and fusing all sorts of styles now. In Scotland, there seems to be an explosion of acts exploring jazz and trad music for example. There’s an awful lot of influence of Latin American, African, and Caribbean rhythms, as well as drum and bass, EDM, Grime and more. People are experimenting with very different instrumentation including electronics, and so on.

Measuring Impact

Beyond attendance numbers, what tells you that your community collaborations are making a genuine difference—what kinds of feedback or outcomes do you personally find meaningful?

The meaningful community outcomes seem to be multiple and varied depending on the kind of work we’re doing. People talk about, for example, feeling like their space is more alive and that more people are attending. Participants in community programmes sometimes talk about the importance of getting out of their house, combating loneliness. There are economic benefits too. The local cafe inside the Middlefield Community Hub does better on the days where there’s a concert, so there’s an economic impact there, small but still there. The workshops there have helped people grow in confidence. They have encouraged people to attend open mic nights where they might have been scared before or unsure about it before. They’ve encouraged dormant musicians, if you like, people who have played for years but not really not played for some time, back out of retirement. It’s encouraging the nursery children to come to visit the concerts, so there’s an element of exposing them to new things and new sounds they maybe wouldn’t have seen before.

It’s a fairly new area of work, so we’ve not evaluated it heavily yet, but this is what we’re hearing. We’ve noted outcomes around confidence, exposure to new materials, increased work for artists and so on..

We also hope that communities such as local Venezuelan communities, African or Nigerian communities, increasingly feel like they have some stake in the festival. And we can see that in the changing demographics of the audience at the festival, and there’s that whole cross-cultural collaboration and the meeting of cultures. So, there are a whole load of outcomes that potentially materialise as a result of this work on the different kinds of community work.

How does combining local Aberdeen talent with international performers influence the festival experience, and what impact does it have on the wider cultural identity of the city?

There are some very specific strands within the Jazz Festival. I would probably call them artist development strands like the Dee Don Danube collaboration where we work with our partners in Germany. They send two musicians and we provide two musicians and they look at local identity through music, local landscapes, local history, but they ultimately bring together their styles and they play, they rehearse and they perform together.

So, there’s something nice there about a partnership with a twin city in Germany and the sharing of musicians and musical styles and I’m sure the audience gets something from that. It’s quite a unique sound that’s produced each year.

The visiting musicians from around Scotland, the UK, and internationally generally tend to pool in a larger audience. So, the local audiences, the local musicians in fact, benefit from the higher audience numbers if they’re put on as a support slot or maybe to perform with a visiting artist. They enjoy a little bit more exposure perhaps and profile and maybe make some new connections with these international artists that could result in future work and collaborations.

The wider cultural identity of the city, I guess - that’s something to do on that larger scale of Aberdeen being associated now for more than 20 years with having a vibrant, lively, interesting, jazz festival each year that lasts for 10 days. It’s quite a large jazz festival - there aren’t many festivals in Scotland that last so long and attract such high-quality artists and good audience numbers.

Looking to the Future

Finally, are there any upcoming community-centred projects or new initiatives that you’re particularly looking forward to, and could you give audiences a hint of what to expect?

I think really looking at all the different kinds of collaborations where we hand over control to a co-programmer or to a cultural community or group, I would check out the Abergaitis performance at Jazz the Day. I would check out the Raven Afrikulture-curated slot within Jazz the Day programme, the blues jam, the HOURS concert with two rap artists. Fine Day, a local company, are also an evening looking at electronic music and improvisation, and so on. Also the concerts in some community spaces. So, we’re going to have a concert in the sheltered housing complex, which is not actually open to the public, an artist guesting and augmenting the band in the dance for Parkinson’s class.

We’re going to have live music in Middlefield. We’re going to have a flamenco workshop in the Middlefield Community Project. We’re going to have a live band in the Tillydrone Community Campus. There’s going to be lots of ways in which this festival connects to its place in ways that are, I think, quite deep and hopefully will be valued by the local people and audiences.

Thanks so much to Simon for giving us his time and sharing his thoughts with us. It's been brilliant to learn about his ideas about community organisation. You can find full details about this year’s Aberdeen Jazz Festival, including the complete lineup and how to book tickets here. The festival runs until 23 March at various venues throughout the city, with tickets priced from free to £22.50.